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Today, I would like to acknowledge the Yuggera people as the Traditional Owners of the beautiful land I am standing on today. From the mountains to the river, I open my heart and my eyes as I walk this land, listening, learning and caring for Country. I want to extend this respect to Elders; past, present and emerging and to all First Nations peoples reading this post today. We are all remembered here.
Just so you know, this post does contain sponsored content through the use of affiliate links, my proud partnerships and my own products and resources and I want to thank each of you for continuing to use my affiliate links to support the work I do. As you know, each blog post is based on my own experiences, opinions, and what I have been taught, and does not represent all First Nations peoples or Communities. Please remember that, connecting with your local First Nations Community is always the most respectful way for you to embed First Nations content specific to your area.
Creating a quality library in my classroom, where my students feel as though they - belong, can relax, make connections and learn, has always been something that I have adored and made a priority, right from my first year of teaching. After all 'Literacy is Freedom'!
So, you can imagine the fun I had when I had our daughter! Naturally, I was excited to begin creating a library for her to relax, make those important connections, belong, share and learn from.
As a teacher and a mum, I am always looking for and creating, resources and ways to build a love of literacy, reading and books in our little ones hearts, and there are truly so many ways to do this in our classrooms and homes.
One of the best resources have ever come across for creating a love of books, reading and literacy, are book spine labels. I know, it sounds a bit strange but hear me out! The reason I have found them so beneficial, is because they give our little learners an opportunity to become skilled at navigating and using a library through the application of higher order literacy skills from a young age. This super simple resource, creates a hands on way for students and children to take phonics and the alphabet, for example, and actually use it in a real life situation.
To give you an idea of what this looks like in action, I want to share with you a little video I took of our daughter, Miss 4, packing her books away the other night before bed.
Of course this isn't the first time that she has done this. This is something that we do each day and it would be something that you would do with your students or children each day as well, to really give them the understanding and the practice they need to be able to confidently do this independently.
So, are book spine labels easy to make?
The short answer, YES! If you are someone who has a good working knowledge of technology and a touch of creativity, then as with all printable resources, making book spine labels is something that you could absolutely create a quite easily. As with all of my resources, I create mine in Canva Pro (I will put a free trial at the bottom of this post for you to use, if you are interested) because it is the easiest, most functional and most incredible tool I have ever used for creating resources and I honestly, cannot recommend it enough.
Once you have made your book spine labels and printed them off, all I do after this is obviously, cut them up into sections and then I use sticky tape to attach them to the spine of my children's books, it is honestly THAT simple.
Tip: I try to use a good quality sticky tape, just so it is durable enough for our little people and to protect the label. I know that you can buy special library printing labels but I don't tend to use these because they are quite expensive and then when you add on the additional costs of the ink as well, it does run the cost up quite a bit when you do have an extensive library. Also, if I am being honest, I know the ink tends to wear off the labels if you don't cover them (this goes for both the special library labels and the paper ones) so, I have found that the sticky tape covering the paper label, has done the trick with me and if they get damaged, I simply just replace it. I've usually got a spare letter sitting around and some sticky tape is easy to come by, so that is how I choose to label my books.
So, have you used book spine labels in your classroom library?
If you have, I would love for you to share your experiences and ideas in the comments for us to all learn from too. I really believe that sharing is caring, especially in our our little teacher community here, it is so important to have each other's backs and share what we know so can all learn and make our teacher lives a little easier for all of us.
I hope you've had a great time reading this blog post and it has been of benefit to you. I have had a wonderful time writing it for you and I can't wait to hear your thoughts and comments about how you're going to use book spine labels in your classroom and home libraries.
Further reading and useful links
If you are looking for any of the books that you saw in my videos and then you can find them by visiting my books page on my website.
If you are looking for the book labels that I shared with you earlier in this post then you can find all of those in my Unlimited Library and many more to come in the future.
I know many of you are also resource creators or looking at becoming a resource creators and I honestly cannot recommend Canva Pro enough. It is all I use to create ALL of the resources I share with you and that you see on my website and social media. If you are interested in using Canva pro then I will attach an affiliate link here for you to use, so you can get a free trial of the pro version.
Free Community Email List
If you enjoyed this post and would like to receive upcoming posts straight to your inbox, then you can join my FREE Community Email List. Our Community is growing every day and I can't wait to start sending you all of the freebies too. If you are already on my list then all of these FREEBIES and this blog post has been sent straight to your email, so be sure to check out out there too.
Thank you so much for spending this time with me and for using your time to listen, learn, unlearn and share, together we will make the greatest difference.
And as always, happy embedding!
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